Importance Splitting for Finite-Time Rare Event Simulation

Rare Event Simulation On the importance function in splitting simulation

The splitting method is a simulation technique for the estimation of very small probabilities. In this technique, the sample paths are split into multiple copies, at various stages in the simulation. Of vital importance to the efficiency of the method is the Importance Function (IF). This function governs the placement of the thresholds or surfaces at which the paths are split. We derive a char...

An overview of importance splitting for rare event simulation

Monte Carlo simulations are a classical tool to analyse physical systems. When unlikely events are to be simulated, the importance sampling technique is often used instead of Monte Carlo. Importance sampling has some drawbacks when the problem dimensionality is high or when the optimal importance sampling density is complex to obtain. In this paper, we focus on a quite novel but somehow confide...

The splitting method in rare event simulation

Nonparametric Adaptive Importance Sampling for Rare Event Simulation

Simulating rare events in telecommunication networks such as estimation for cell loss probability in Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks requires a major simulation effort due to the slight chance of buffer overflow. Importance Sampling (IS) is applied to accelerate the occurrence of rare events. Importance Sampling depends on a biasing scheme to make the estimator from IS unbiased. Adapt...

Adaptive multilevel splitting for rare event analysis

The estimation of rare event probability is a crucial issue in areas such as reliability, telecommunications, aircraft management. In complex systems, analytical study is out of question and one has to use Monte Carlo methods. When rare is really rare, which means a probability less than 10−9, naive Monte Carlo becomes unreasonable. A widespread technique consists in multilevel splitting, but t...